Dickens and Thackeray: Punishment and ForgivenessAttitudes toward punishment and forgiveness in English society of the nineteenth century came, for the most part, out of Christianity. In actual experience the ideal was not often met, but in the literature of the time the model was important. For novelists attempting to tell exciting and dramatic stories, violent and criminal activities played an important role, and, according to convention, had to be corrected through poetic justice or human punishment. Both Dickens' and Thackeray's novels subscribed to the ideal, but dealt with the dilemma it presented in slightly different ways. At a time when a great deal of attention has been directed toward economic production and consumption as the bases for value, Reed's well-documented study reviving moral belief as a legitimate concern for the analysis of nineteenth-century English texts is particularly illuminating. |
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... associated this trend with American juvenile literature that , she said , revealed the calculating charac- ter of Americans . A quarter of a century later , a similar review article by Ben- nett G. Johns deplored the heavily religious ...
... associated with one may easily be transferred to the other . Thus , if Pecksniff is an actual swindler , who uses his students ' ideas for his own enhancement , he is equally capable of presenting as his own moral collateral the virtues ...
... associated with Fagin in Oliver Twist ( The Presence of the Present : Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel [ Columbus : Ohio State University Press , 1991 ] , 601 ) . See also J. J. Tobias ' Prince of Fences : The Life and Crimes of ...
Contents
Attitudes Toward Punishment and Forgiveness | 3 |
Some of the contents of this study appeared elsewhere in different form Mate | 28 |
Education | 30 |
Copyright | |
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